Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Will the minister outline the recent work of the Climate Commission and why it is important to have a clear, fact based debate about climate change? How have the findings of the commission been received and what is the government's response?

Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wakefield for his question. As members of the House would be aware, the Climate Commission has today held a forum in Parliament House as part of a series of forums the commission has been conducting around Australia to help deepen the understanding of the climate science. It follows the publication of the commission's report yesterday, which provides an important update on the climate science and outlines the risks we confront from climate change. There is nothing like this issue to bring out the extent of misrepresentation that the Leader of the Opposition will engage in. Yesterday the Leader of the Opposition claimed that the Climate Commission's report vindicated the coalition's so-called 'direct action policy', but when you look at what the report says about direct action measures, which rely almost entirely on carbon offsets through tree planting and soil management to store carbon, quite a different story emerges. The report has this to say:

It cannot substitute in the long term for the reduction of an equivalent amount of CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. In fact, the offset approach, if poorly implemented, has the potential to lock in more severe climate change for the future.

As if that was not clear enough, the author of the report, Professor Will Steffen, had this to say yesterday in relation to this approach:

There's a very good case for getting carbon back into the land, but if that's all you do, or if you use that to delay action on fossil fuel emissions, you will have gone backwards a long way.

This is another example of the way in which the Leader of the Opposition continually misrepresents the facts and the science in this debate . The point is that we can look to methods for storage of carbon but at the end of the day we must cut pollution levels in our economy to tackle this issue and we must drive investment in cleaner energy sources.

Given that the Leader of the Opposition previously attended the rally outside Parliament House organised by a number of interesting organisations and individuals, including the League of Rights and Pauline Hanson, it is particularly disappointing that the Leader of the Opposition would not attend the forum today in Parliament House run by well-respected scientists and economists on the issue of the climate science. A couple of his colleagues were there today, including the shadow minister, the member for Flinders. At least we should acknowledge that the member for Flinders has been trying to provide the Liberal Party some respectability on the climate science, but he is up against a pretty powerful group, within his own side of politics, of deniers on this issue. Senator Minchin, Senator Abetz, Senator Joyce, Senator Boswell, the member for Indi and the member for Tangney have all, over the last 24 hours, trashed his claim that the coalition has bipartisan support over the climate science. In fact, they have walked all over him and the Leader of the Opposition does nothing to stand up for his shadow minister on this important issue. On this side of the House, we respect the climate science and accept the responsibility to act upon it. On that side of the House, they do nothing but deny the evidence and they will not take responsibility. (Time expired)